Here we are again approaching your annual epic celebration of life…liberty…and the pursuit of happiness. How quickly days fly by on the temporal continuum of historical milestones! It seems like just yesterday that I was sending you birthday wishes and my hopes and dreams for your future. Now you are a year older….and wiser? As I look back over the intervening span of time, I am sad to say that I can’t see evidence that you sifted through any of your experiences and used wisdom to move yourself forward in a positive direction. Instead, I feel it has been rather like a game of Chutes and Ladders, where instead of advancing, you have found yourself sliding backwards and losing ground.

On the occasion of this July celebration, I often give conscious thought to the sacrifices in the name of your birthright, both to gain it and retain it. The unbroken line of men and women from all ancestral lineages, who have fought in lands faraway and on our own shores to secure our freedoms, remind us dearly of these bequests. Our red, white, and blue house is furnished with patriotic and heroic deeds for which you should be supremely proud, but let’s not forget that your closet is also full of those proverbial skeletons. There is no judgement, as both have helped to shape who you are. It is in these challenges that you have grown and matured. You must remember to harness the knowledge acquired from those skeletons, so that they may inform the wisdom of your present and future behaviors and honor the sacrifices that have been made on your behalf.

America…you and your children have always been so very resilient against a common enemy, just like in families when siblings fight among themselves but at the end of the day have each others back against the world. Time and again that has been well documented within the pages of your history. But now I believe that you are in need of some family counseling. It is the daily squabbles of your children that have reached a level of divisiveness that distresses me greatly because it endangers you. Your children are so distracted in their bickering that they are leaving their backs vulnerable to the world. This is not a new problem, evidently, because Abraham Lincoln warned you about it over a century ago in his very prophetic words “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” I implore you to please take heed and concentrate on healing your family squabbles!

So this year I send my birthday wishes echoed with another one from Honest Abe “My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.” May we PLEASE celebrate what we are for and not what we are against? America, your children have an opportunity to demonstrate that we are a family, all uniquely different members, who may not always agree but have each others’ back….. and once again bring us together into the United States of America. May God ever bless those efforts!